tolerate it
Details
- Stated inspiration
- From the Evermore prologue's set of "marriages gone bad", this is the one she calls "ambivalent toleration."
“I made you my temple, my mural, my sky Now I'm begging for footnotes in the story of your life”
One person's whole devotional vocabulary runs up against the other's indifference, and the two halves of the bridge measure the gap between them. She builds him a temple, a mural, a sky, which is the language of worship rather than partnership. What she asks for in return is a footnote, the smallest unit of text there is, and she has to beg for it. Everything the speaker does is effortful and visible: waiting by the door, laying the table, greeting him with a battle hero's welcome. Everything he does is withholding, and the title supplies the verb for it. Tolerating is not rejection, which would at least be a response. It is the partner present, unmoved, asking nothing of himself, while she performs a devotion sized for somebody who is not there.
“Always taking up too much space or time I wait by the door like I'm just a kid”
Two lines describe somebody asking permission to exist near another person. She waits by the door rather than coming in, positioned like a child waiting to be let through, and she worries about always taking up too much space or time, as though her presence were a cost he absorbs. The claim here is not that her effort goes unreturned, which is a different reading of the same song and is made elsewhere. It is that she has accepted his terms for how much room she is allowed, and never tests them. The room is there to be taken. She treats it as borrowed.
“Now I'm begging for footnotes in the story of your life”
The speaker reduced from protagonist to marginal notation. Having given everything, she finds herself positioned as supplementary material in a narrative he has already authored for himself, a minor reference at the bottom of the page rather than its co-author. The footnote image is among the most precise deployments of the narrative-ownership register in the catalogue: the distance between telling a story and being footnoted in someone else's is the full measure of what she has lost.
“Now I'm begging for footnotes in the story of your life”
The footnote as a literal typographic convention of the written page, the annotation that sits below the main body of a text. In deploying this specific physical-text term the speaker reaches for the most precise language of the page available: she is not asking to be in the story but to be referenced in its margins, reduced to the smallest unit of written acknowledgement that scholarly convention allows. The book's physical architecture carries the full weight of her diminishment.
“I sit and watch you I notice everything you do or don't do”
Watching is one-directional and that is the complaint. She catalogues everything he does and does not do while he never looks up, which turns attention itself into the evidence of the imbalance.
“I wait by the door like I'm just a kid”
The door as the post of an unequal devotion. Waiting beside it for attention that may not arrive, the speaker shrinks herself to a child at the threshold of a love that does not meet her there.
“I made you my temple, my mural, my sky”
She builds the beloved into a temple, a devotion the song then watches go unanswered.
trying to hold attention / effort that stops
“stopped trying to make him laugh, stopped trying to drill the safe”
“I'm still trying everything to get you laughing at me” — mirrorball
Community reading by @Wraiths_and_Wreckage on the mirrorball YouTube episode and Patreon commenter SamIam reads mirrorball alongside tolerate it as two positions in the same arc: mirrorball is the speaker still working to hold someone's attention, still performing for an audience that has already started to leave; tolerate it is the epilogue, the moment the trying stops. The bridge's "still trying everything to get you laughing at me" pairs with tolerate it's "stopped trying to make him laugh" as before and after on the same effort.
the whole song as an inner narrative while watching him
“I sit and watch you”
“But I swear You were there” — evermore
A Patreon reader hears evermore work the way tolerate it does: the song read as an interior monologue running underneath an ordinary domestic scene, the speaker narrating her own depression while physically sitting and watching the other person. The "you were there" that breaks the spell lands like the return to the room - the cabin floor creaking underfoot - after a stretch spent inside her own head.
carrying then losing the weight of the other
“Gain the weight of you then lose it”
“I'm a soldier who's returning half her weight” — All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (TV)
Community readers join the soldier image to tolerate it: the speaker comes home from the relationship at half her weight, the missing half read as the partner she had been carrying, just as tolerate it weighs the labour of holding someone who never holds back. In both the speaker has borne the relationship's full load alone, and what is lost at the end is the weight of the other person as much as her own.
his version of tolerating it
“You finally left the table / You're starving 'til you're not” — Opalite
Community readers cast the second verse's starving figure who "finally left the table" as living his own version of tolerate it - the partner who waits, under-fed by the relationship, until he recognises it is time to go.